BLINDSIGHT (Firefall, 1)

Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe sparking fitfully past Neptunes orbit hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatevers out there isnt talking to us. Its talking to some distant star perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesnt wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities her brain surgically partitioned into separate sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she wont be needed. You send a monster to command them all an extinct hominid predator once called vampire recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesistan informational topologist with half his mind goneas an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing theyve been sent to find.